In Robert Hayden’s, “Those Winter Sundays” the reader is shown an imaginary view of how love can be compared to fire and cold compared to angers. The poem is brief and short but contains various interpretations because of the imagery of how love and fire can be synonymous. After analyzing the poem, it can be said what is necessary to understand real love, because the son is remembering of how his father used to work even on cold winter Sundays to keep him and his family warm and protected.
Hayden’s use the first stanza to emphasize that and how nobody ever thanked the father for what he used to do and even though he continued doing it for many years because the father loved the family more than anything and was his duty to make them feel safe. Robert Hayden was born in August 4.1913 in Detroit Michigan and died in February 25,1980.
In addition to poetry, Hayden became the first African American to be appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Hayden’s poems confront the brutality of racism, “The Middle” passage is a poem that rarity that and a dramatic view of slave trade. Hayden also worked as a professor in Fisk University between (1946-1969) and was also teacher at University of Michigan between (1969-1980).
After reading the poem Hayden’s use of image words to captivate the reader. In addition to that after analyzing closer the first stanza serves to illustrate how the father put the effort to help the family to get warm in the cold working every weekday with crack hands and showing how devoted to the family his father was: “then with cracked hands/fires blaze”(lines 2-4.)The second stanza the son is saying how was hard to wake up in the cold because he could hear it splintering and breaking and this sound brings to him chronic angers. Other interpretation to the second stanza is that he was having trouble to deal with the cold but when he saw his dad was outside chopping firewood as fuel to keep the house and the family protected from the cold he could go down and see how important the dad was and he remembers that no one have ever thanked him for that and this would make him fell angers.
In addition the last stanza is exactly about how he feels, that he does not know anything about love’s austere and lonely offices and his father was a master when it comes to this subject because austere love is the true love, you give what you can give not expecting nothing in return just like his dad used to do in the winter days protecting the family, dividing the family duties with his job in the office alone. To conclude Those Winter Sundays is a simple yet captivating poem. By deriving meaning from words in the poem as an allegory for a grander view of things, it gives a deeper level of comprehensiveness to the poem. Accordingly, the allegory can be summed up in a season that brings opposite feelings and sensations. Cold of the winter that can be anger to a person, but also the hot from the chopped woods that somebody had to chop to make the house warm that shows love.
